Human Hibernation

They've been called medical miracles: People submerged in icy water, or buried in snow, with no breath or heartbeat. They seem dead, yet a fortunate few are revived—thanks to the cold. Now, across the country, ER doctors are intentionally chilling their patients into hypothermia; meanwhile, scientists are hoping that a cocktail of drugs inspired by hibernating animals could one day perform the same "miracles" on demand.

Can We Live Forever?

PBS Airdate: January 26, 2011

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON
(Astrophysicist,
American Museum of Natural History)
:
Hi, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host of NOVA
scienceNOW, where this season we're asking six big questions. On this episode:
Can We Live Forever?

Some
folks seem to be built to last. This guy is 91!

CHUCK
YOGI
(Honolulu Heart Program Participant)
:
I'm 96.

WOMAN
(Jewish Centenarian)
:
Ninety-seven.

SAMUEL
HARANO
(Honolulu Heart Program
Participant)
:
Ninety-eight.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
These people live
long and healthy lives. So what's their secret? And where can I get some?

The
answer may lie in these guys.

CYNTHIA
KENYON
(University of California, San
Francisco)
:
They're like
90-year-old people who look 45.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
And what if you
could replace your broken down human organs as easily as you replace the
muffler on your car? Researchers insist that day is coming, and sooner than you
think.

DORIS
TAYLOR
(University of Minnesota)
:
I absolutely see a day where there will be jars of
kidneys, jars of livers and jars of lungs, whatever it is you need.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
He thinks we can
build digital copies of real people that will carry our thoughts, memories and
wisdom into the future, for all posterity.

JASON
LEIGH'S AVATAR:
You mean me?

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
All that and more,
on this episode of NOVA ScienceNow.

You
know, we take it for granted that nothing lasts forever. And that's true of
life itself. Every living thing will eventually break down and die. But does it
have to be that way? Can we live forever?

We
begin our show with a man who seems to have done the impossible. He's
completely stopped the natural decay and death that all of us expect; not for
himself but for his car.

IRVIN
GORDON
(Car Owner)
:
My name is Irvin Gordon. My car now has 2,741,000
miles on it.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
You heard him: more
than two-point-seven million miles. The Guinness Book of Records says it's the
highest mileage automobile in the world.

IRV
GORDON:
Every time the car goes go out, I break my own record and make it
harder for anybody else to catch up.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
And they'd have
over four decades of catching up to do. He drove his new Volvo off the lot 44
years ago, and he and his car have been going strong ever since.

IRV
GORDON:
You don't have to be the fastest to drive a million miles, you got to
just hang in there the longest.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
So this is your
baby, huh?

IRV
GORDON:
This is my baby. Don't touch that car.

Watch your knees.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
It's hard to
understand how a car can last so long, look so good and ride so well after all
those miles. Irv's car has the same mileage as all of the Apollo moon landings
combined! How many places on Earth and things to do take you 3,000,000 miles to
get there?

IRV
GORDON:
Commuting 125 miles a day, to and from work.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
One-hundred-twenty-five
miles round-trip?

IRV
GORDON:
Thirty-five years.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Are you retired
now?

IRV
GORDON:
I'm retired.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
So, retired from
what?

IRV
GORDON:
I'm retired 12 years ago.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
From what?

IRV
GORDON:
I was a science teacher.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Excellent!

Most
of the nearly 3,000,000 miles have come from 44 years of crisscrossing the
country. The odometer turns over every hundred-thousand miles. Do the math,
it's turned over...

IRV
GORDON:
Twenty-seven times; it's on its 28
th.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
So, what does Irv
do to get his car to live forever? Well, number one, regular maintenance.

IRV
GORDON:
I just do the things it says to do, when it says to do them.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Irv says it's not
any different from a living organism.

IRV
GORDON:
Like your body replaces parts. How many times have all those different
cells replaced themselves completely, from beginning to end? Does that make you
not you? It's the same argument.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
And of course Irv
would know.

IRV
GORDON:
Well, this is coming from a science teacher.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
And so, Irv will
keep on going.

IRV
GORDON:
Who would expect how a car would change your life.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
When you look at
pictures taken over the years, you see a man getting older as his car remains
as new as the day he drove it off the lot, more than four decades ago.

IRV
GORDON:
It doesn't show any signs of giving up. And hopefully this second
rebuild will outlast my ability to keep driving.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
And that leaves me
with one last question: Can I drive your car?

IRV
GORDON:
Absolutely not. Nobody drives my car but me.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Nobody?

IRV
GORDON:
Nobody.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Nobody?

IRV
GORDON:
Nobody.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Nobody?

IRV
GORDON:
Nobody.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
If something in
your car breaks or stops working, like your radiator, you can always just take
it out and replace it, but what about us? If my body parts break down, like my
heart, I might be able to get a transplant, but right now, even if I could find
a replacement part, one, it's going to be used, and two, my body might just
reject it. The dream would be to replace my heart, or whatever's broken, with
a brand new version, in perfect, working condition, but exactly like my
original. People have been talking about this for years, but now, thanks to
some brand new discoveries, the dream of custom-made, personalized body parts
may soon become a reality.

In the 2005 sci-fi thriller,
The
Island
, people have found a way to live forever: they grow clones and
harvest their organs. But real science may be on the verge of a less diabolical
solution.

This,
for example, is no special effect. It's a lab-grown lung, no clone attached.

DORIS
TAYLOR:
I absolutely see a day
where you'll walk into a manufacturing facility somewhere, and there will be
jars of kidneys, jars of livers and jars of lungs, whatever it is you need.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Just as in
The
Island
, your body would accept the new organ because it would be yours,
grown from your cells.

JOSEPH
VACANTI
(Massachusetts General Hospital)
:
And there would be no more waiting lists for
organs, there would be no more rejection. We would enter a new era, where we
could build you an identical, ideal replacement.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
But how do you make
an organ without a body to build it in?

We've
been growing cells in the lab for decades, but they just sit around in flat
layers or clumps. So how would you coax them to form a three-dimensional organ
like a heart, with chambers, valves and blood vessels?

Maybe it's the same way you go from this to this.

See,
an organ is not unlike a building. It's a collection of parts that has to come
together and work together. You can think of a cinder block as a cell. The
problem is a block or a cell alone is not enough. To construct a building you
need to begin with an internal framework, or scaffold, to define the parts and
hold them together.

Thirty
years ago, transplant surgeon Jay Vacanti and chemical engineer Robert Langer
realized that to build an organ, cells also need a framework, a scaffold to
guide their growth. The challenge was to engineer scaffold materials living
tissue could grow on.

ROBERT
LANGER
(Massachusetts Institute of
Technology)
:
So this is a
material that we call "bio-rubber."

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Bio-rubber; and you
use the prefix "bio," because whatever is the material, it will take to flesh
or living cells?

ROBERT
LANGER:
That's right.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
So why does the
cell even care?

ROBERT
LANGER:
Because a, because of a lot of
things could be toxic to a cell, or the cell wouldn't like their surface and
wouldn't be able to grow on it.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Picky cells.

ROBERT
LANGER:
Cells are picky, and some are more
picky than others.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
But sculpting a
scaffold out of the right material was only a start. To turn one into a living
body part, an ear, for example, it must then be seeded with cells.

A
few weeks in an incubator allows those cells to multiply, covering the
scaffold. Then comes a rather strange test.

This is really creepy. I mean, mice are creepy enough, and this one has no hair
and a human ear growing on its back.

JAY
VACANTI:
Yes.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
He doesn't seem to
mind that he has an ear growing on his back.

JAY
VACANTI:
No,
he knows he's here for a bigger purpose. But this is a very, very important
step in the science, because, on the back of this animal, we're actually
incubating and growing perfect cartilage in the shape of a human ear. And it's
completely connected to the blood vessels, so that it's just like a native ear
in a normal circumstance.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
In the head of a
person?

JAY
VACANTI:
That's
correct.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
So when this
finally gets implanted in a human you don't expect rejection, as is so common
with new body parts.

JAY
VACANTI:
Exactly,
because we're going to start with the patient's own cells, it'll make his own
tissue, and, therefore, the body will accept it.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Within a year,
Vacanti and Langer expect to be implanting their ears directly on the heads of
soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But
these will not be the first recipients of lab-grown body parts. Already,
patients of other doctors have received blood vessels, skin, muscles, even
bladders built the same way.

ROBERT LANGER:
I think, with enough
research, most parts of the body will be replaceable. And I haven't come across
very many body parts where somebody, somewhere isn't working on trying to
replace them.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Which is certainly
encouraging news for people who need more complex body parts, like 20-year-old
Stacey.

STACEY
(Liver Disease
Patient)
:
I was in the hospital,
and that's when they came in and told me that I may need a new liver.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
But will she get
one? Every day, nearly 20 Americans die, waiting for donor organs.

JAY
VACANTI:
So,
this problem is an extraordinary problem. There are too few organs for the
well-over-100,000 Americans waiting.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
But if we are ever
to make the complex organs most needed to save lives, like livers and hearts,
the scaffold builders will have to overcome an obstacle, namely, plumbing. In a
building it's pretty straightforward. Pipes carry fluid where it's needed, just
like blood vessels in the body, except that in a major organ like the heart...

DORIS
TAYLOR:
You need a blood
vessel per cell, because the heart works all day every day. And I don't know if
you've ever seen blood vessels, really. But they look like a tree. And the
challenge is not to build that big limb, but to build those little tiny
branches that come off.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
But building these
intricate branches might be unnecessary, if we take advantage of a remarkable
fact: organs are not just made of cells.

DORIS
TAYLOR:
So if you wash the
cells away, what's left? And what's left are these proteins on which the cells sit.
And they form the framework of the organ, the scaffold.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
These natural
scaffolds hold an organ's shape down to the smallest detail, including every
blood vessel. So could they be used to build a complex organ like a heart?

Six
years ago, no one could say, because no one had ever stripped a heart of its
cells, leaving the scaffold intact. But Taylor's colleague, Harald Ott, thought
he could find a way. He would use the blood vessels in a rat's heart to deliver
a chemical that would dissolve its cells, and nothing else. But which chemical?

HARALD
OTT:
So
the process of finding the right chemical was literally a trial and error
process, starting from A to Z on the chemical shelf.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
First, Ott tried
enzymes, but they dissolved both the cells and the scaffold. Other chemicals
caused the hearts to swell up. Finally, he tried a soap commonly found in
shampoos.

HARALD
OTT:
We
saw the heart become translucent. And it was obvious to us all that something
had happened that hadn't happened in the months before.

DORIS
TAYLOR:
What we had is this
thing that looked like a heart, but it looked like a ghost heart, if you will.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Injections of dye
showed the scaffold to be undamaged, down to the smallest blood vessels. And we
now know that this technique works with many organs, including human-sized
ones.

DORIS
TAYLOR:
This is essentially
the scaffold of a heart. Who knew a heart had a full skeleton? But it
essentially has no cells, dead or alive. It's beautiful. You can see the blood
vessels here, the chambers of the heart. You can see the valves.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
But could a bare
scaffold, once again become the framework of a living heart? Taylor soon
discovered it was more than a matter of injecting cells.

DORIS
TAYLOR:
Just putting cells on
a scaffold isn't enough. It's putting cells on a scaffold and giving them an
electrical signal, and giving them a mechanical blood pressure, and then giving
them oxygen. It's not just a heart in a jar. It's a heart in an artificial
body. So, it's simple in many ways, and it's unbelievably complicated.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
After eight days,
the first lab-grown heart beat on its own.

DORIS
TAYLOR:
It really makes you
go, "What is life?" the first time you see something beat that was dead. It's
one of those "yes" moments in life.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Since then, Ott has
joined Massachusetts General Hospital and used the same method to build a pair
of lungs. After coming back to life, one lung was successfully implanted in a
rat.

So,
if you can make a working living lung, then it seems to me that you can...

HARALD
OTT:
...build,
literally, any organ.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Any organ!

This
novel approach has already made a difference in the real world. In Barcelona, Spain,
this woman, Claudia Castillo, might be dead without it.

Two
years ago, tuberculosis devastated her windpipe, making it difficult to for her
to breath. But surgeon Paolo Macchiarini saw a solution: give Claudia a new
windpipe, which her body would never reject, because it would be made of her
own cells, grown on a natural scaffold.

And
so, in June of 2008, Macchiarini and an international team of specialists
removed a windpipe from a human cadaver, washed it clean, and reseeded it with
living cells from Claudia's body.

Four
days later, the new windpipe was transplanted into Claudia.

PAOLO
MACCHIARINI
(USP Instituto Universitario
Dexeus)
:
If you transplant an
organ without tissue engineering, you need immunosuppression, you need close
watching. And this was absolutely not the case for Claudia. She never had any
sign of rejection. Indeed, four days after surgery she was home.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
More than a year
later, Claudia is living a normal life, free of the fear that she will reject
her new body part.

CLAUDIA
CASTILLO
(Windpipe Transplant
Recipient/Translation)
:
I feel
like the transplant is not from the body of another person. It's mine.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
That sense of
ownership might soon be crucial to organ recipients, because their scaffolds
might not come from a person at all.

DORIS
TAYLOR:
This is a pig kidney,
sliced in half, and it's the same size, same complexity as a human kidney. We
could cover this with human cells and, in theory, build you a kidney.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Human organs built
on natural or artificial scaffolds, made from a patient's own cells to avoid
rejection, available in unlimited supply? Most researchers believe it will be a
reality within decades, and Taylor is even more optimistic.

DORIS
TAYLOR:
Kidney, liver,
lung...we're not decades away from building something complicated, we more like
years away.

In addition to
organ scaffolding... there is:

(Text of Tao
Xu's paper about Inkjet Gene Printing)

Yes!

Researchers at
Wake Forest University adapted an ordinary inkjet printer to print organs.

They filled an
empty ink cartridge with cells.

And printed out
a two-chamber mouse heart.

Coolest part?
It actually beat.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
(As an auto
mechanic) Just like some well-made cars, some people last longer than others.
They don't fall apart, and they don't even need replacement parts. What's up
with that? (As a medical patient) You know, if medical researchers figure it
out, maybe everyone could last longer. (As an auto mechanic) Correspondent Ziya
Tong tracked down some lucky folks who don't age like most of us and the
doctors who are trying to figure out the secret to their Fountain of Youth.
(As a medical patient) So how'd I do?

ZIYA
TONG:
(Correspondent)
:
Some people are like forces of nature: aging
gracefully is simple for them.

RAY
KURZWEIL
(Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.)
:
That might sound like a lot, but it's not enough to
just be natural. I take 400 milligrams a day of resveratrol, a lot of vitamin
D.

ZIYA
TONG:
So what's he doing with all those pills?

RAY
KURZWEIL:
In my view, death is a
great robber of all the things that give meaning to life. It destroys knowledge
and wisdom and relationships, and there's actually a lot that you can do to
slow down these aging and disease processes.

ZIYA
TONG:
But is Ray wasting his time looking for a
Fountain of Youth that's just a myth?

RAY
KURZWEIL:
The goal, right now, is to
live long enough to get to a future point where we will have technologies that
will extend our longevity even further.

ZIYA
TONG:
In fact, scientists have been tinkering in the
lab, trying to extend life for a long time, and they've come up with a couple
of things that do work in animals. Calorie restriction, for instance, basically
putting an animal on a diet, seems to kick in a survival response and helps it
live longer. And they've found a substance in red wine that has a similar
effect. But what if somebody could figure out how these guys did it so
effortlessly?

JAMES
HARAI:
The
fish not cooperating today. I think they're camera shy, I mean.

ZIYA
TONG:
Cynthia Kenyon thinks she may have found one of
the keys to a long life in a tiny, nearly microscopic worm called C. elegans.

So how can we learn anything about human aging
from these tiny little worms?

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
I know they look really different
from us, but the basic processes of life are very similar at the molecular
level.

ZIYA
TONG:
The good thing about these little guys is that
they get old and die in just a little over two weeks.

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
Now, I'm going to show you the
same kind of worms, but just two weeks later, when they're old.

ZIYA
TONG:
Wow!

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
So this is a, yeah, normal worm
when it's old. You can see that they're about to die.

ZIYA
TONG:
Oh, wow. So these are really slow-moving here. I
didn't think you could see aging in a worm so dramatically.

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
Okay, so now what I'm going to
show you are worms that are the same age, but you'll see that they look much
younger.

ZIYA
TONG:
So these worms are the exact same age as the ones
that we saw that were almost dead?

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
Yup, they look much younger, even
though they're the same age.

ZIYA
TONG:
And they're wriggling about just like the other
ones, huh?

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
So they're like 90-year-old people
who look 45.

ZIYA
TONG:
That's incredible. So what's different about
these?

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
We've changed one gene; that's
all.

ZIYA
TONG:
Kenyon changed one gene in the worm. Genes are
made of D.N.A., long strings of 4 chemicals, best known by their initials: A,
G, C and T. Together, they form the basis of all life on Earth. Kenyon found
that there was a gene that scientists call FOXO, which had a central role in
keeping her worms freakishly youthful.

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
What FOXO does is it helps the
animal to protect and repair its tissues. The reason that it can do it is this
one gene controls a lot of other genes.

ZIYA
TONG:
FOXO is a master control gene, meaning it
regulates hundreds of other genes, genes that have a profound effect on the
worms' health.

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
So you can think of it as a
superintendent of a building. So if you have a building, a nice big building,
obviously it has to be maintained. What FOXO does, or the building
superintendent does, is to keep the building in good working order.

ZIYA
TONG:
The superintendent makes sure that the
electricity works and that the roof doesn't leak.

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
It makes sure that the walls are
painted, by hiring painters; it makes sure that the floors are swept.

ZIYA
TONG:
But the superintendent doesn't actually do all
these important jobs.

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
The building superintendent would
hire workers to do these different things. What FOXO does, in the cell, is it
switches on other genes.

ZIYA
TONG:
Those worker genes do jobs like enhancing the
immune system and protecting the cells from bacterial infection.

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
Some of these genes that protect
the cell make proteins that will kill invading micro-organisms. Others are
switched on that are antioxidant genes.

ZIYA
TONG:
Kind of like a rust inhibitor for a cell.

Now,
most living things need oxygen, but oxygen can actually be damaging to cells
that aren't prepared to deal with it. And, yes, there's a worker gene for that,
too.

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
I'd say, altogether, there are
probably about a hundred worker genes that have very important roles. And,
together, what you get is a cell or tissue or an animal that stays in really
good working condition for a lot longer.

ZIYA
TONG:
All those processes are actually directed by the
FOXO superintendent gene.

Kenyon
tweaked one gene in the worms and made FOXO more active. With a more active
superintendent, the cells became more resilient than normal and Kenyon's worms
lived twice as long.

If
there's one gene that dramatically increases lifespan in worms, could the same
be true in humans?

JAMES
HARAI:
I
went to Alaska 10 times.

ZIYA
TONG:
Yeah? They have big fish in Alaska, right?

Mr.
Harai and the others are part of a groundbreaking 45-year study in Hawaii
that's trying to find out.

BRADLEY
WILLCOX, M.D.
(Kuakini Medical Center)
:
The Honolulu Heart Program population is a group of
Japanese-American men...

SAMUEL
HARANO:
Beautiful sunset...

BRADLEY
WILLCOX:
...that we have followed since
the 1960s.

CHUCK
YOGI:
When
you hear people my age, they say it's so hard to even get out of bed, so I say,
"So why don't you jump up?" But they say, "No, no!"

ZIYA
TONG:
What's he have that other people don't?

CHUCK
YOGI:
Thirty-five
times.

BRADLEY
WILLCOX:
What's important for aging is
it's a process. So we've studied the process in these men for decades.

ZIYA
TONG:
Willcox and geneticist Timothy Donlon wanted to
see if they could find out anything about the genetics of human aging from this
unique scientific resource.

TIMOTHY
DONLON
(Kuakini Medical Center)
:
This is one of the freezers that houses the over
8,000 samples from this project that's been conducted over the last 45 years.

ZIYA
TONG:
Wow. So this is, like, data, frozen in time?

TIMOTHY
DONLON:
That's right, safely tucked away,
here.

ZIYA
TONG:
Using these samples, they tested five genes that
had already been shown to help animals live longer, to see if any of them would
extend human life as well.

BRADLEY
WILLCOX:
And based on that list, we found
one gene that was heads and shoulders above everything else. And that was the
FOXO gene.

ZIYA
TONG:
The FOXO gene! That's right: the same
superintendent gene that helped double the life of Cynthia Kenyon's tiny worms.
Though everybody has the FOXO gene, these Hawaiian men seem to be living longer,
healthier lives because they have a protective version of FOXO.

TIMOTHY
DONLON:
We found that if you have this
FOXO gene, you have a two-fold chance of living to a hundred. And if you have
two copies of this, you have a threefold chance of living to a hundred.

ZIYA
TONG:
A gene typically consists of two copies. You get
one copy from your mother and one copy from your father.

BRADLEY
WILLCOX:
So with FOXO, the area that we
looked at, you could have a C or a G from your mom and your dad. The vast majority
of us have two Cs. About 25 percent of us have one G and one C, and about 10
percent have two Gs. If you have two Gs, you hit the jackpot: that's triple the
odds of living to be a hundred. You can go to Vegas with those odds!

ZIYA
TONG:
I'm not very good at this, but I read palms a
little bit, and, believe it or not, you actually have an incredibly long
lifeline.

SAMUEL
HARANO:
No kidding?

ZIYA
TONG:
Yeah, you do!

BRADLEY
WILLCOX:
And not only triple your odds of
living that long, but being healthy. So it was a gene that appeared to be
associated with extended health-span, not just lifespan.

CYNTHIA
KENYON:
It tells us that FOXO in humans
affects aging. You could have imagined that we have the gene, but it doesn't do
the same thing, but this says it does!

ZIYA
TONG:
News of the Hawaii study sped around the world,
and scientists confirmed the results in population after population: in
Germany, Italy, New England, California and in China.

Nir
Barzilai of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York...

HAROLD
LAUFMAN
(Jewish Centenarian)
:
I'm now 98 years old.

ZIYA
TONG:
...also found a similar pattern in the FOXO genes
of Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians.

WOMAN
(Jewish Centenarian)
:
I'm 96.

MAN
(Jewish Centenarian)
:
Ninety-seven.

WOMAN
(Jewish Centenarian)
:
Ninety-eight.

NIR
BARZILAI
(Institute for Aging Research,
Albert Einstein College of Medicine)
:
This data on the FOXO pathway that came from Hawaii and then confirmed
by us, was confirmed by other groups. And, in fact, it's the most consistent,
validated study in this field, suggesting that this is real and important for
human aging and longevity.

ARTHUR
STERN
(Jewish Centenarian)
:
We don't feel old; we feel young.

ARTHUR
STERN'S FRIEND
(Jewish Centenarian)
:
We don't feel old.

NIR
BARZILAI:
And
it's also consistent with what we have learned, that there's this whole concept
of a superintendent that is regulating whatever is going in the house.

ZIYA
TONG:
Oh! You got one, you got one, you got one!

And
in the future, that knowledge could be used to develop new drugs to combat
age-related diseases...

JAMES
HARAI:
Fish
on!

ZIYA
TONG:
...and,
perhaps someday, to help us live longer.

Good job, Mr. Harai!

BRADLEY
WILLCOX:
The vast majority of us get an
average set of genes. So it's what you do that becomes most important: eating a
good diet, regular physical activity, engaged in life.

CHUCK
YOGI:
As
you age, I think every little thing pleases you more than in the past.

SAMUEL
HARANO:
And now I've got to aim for the
century mark, yeah?

ZIYA
TONG:
So how do you think you're going to celebrate
your 100th birthday?

SAMUEL
HARANO:
Hundred candles? It would be a
fire hazard, huh?

ZIYA
TONG:
Yeah, it would be a fire hazard.

Meet the
jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii.

They begin life
as a larva...

Then turn into
a "polyp"...

And then become
a mature jellyfish.

But when times
get tough, it can revert to a polyp again!

Then later grow
back into an adult jellyfish.

It can live
FOREVER.

In theory.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
(As an auto
mechanic) At least for now, it's much easier to extend the life of a car than
of a person like you or me. The car's not flesh and blood and complex organs.
But what if you could create a version of yourself that was indestructable?

In
this episode's profile, we'll meet a computer scientist who wants to build
virtual versions of ourselves, avatars, that look, act and talk like real
people and who will hang around, long after the flesh and blood versions of us
are dead and gone.

In
1987, when Jason Leigh tuned in to
Star
Trek: The Next Generation
, he saw the holodeck for the very first
time:...

BRENT
SPINER
(as Lieutenant Commander Data,
Star
Trek: The Next Generation
/Film Clip)
:
I was curious to see how three of history's greatest minds would
interact in this setting.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
... a place where
people from the distant past can live on as computer-generated holograms.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
And that's when a
sci-fi TV show gave this computer scientist his big idea: a way to allow all of
us to, in a sense, live forever.

JASON
LEIGH:
If
you were to think about that when
Star Trek

first came out, you
would think, "Oh, this would be impossible to do," but now it's possible.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
At the University
of Illinois, Chicago, Jason has been obsessed with turning this fantasy into
reality through Project Lifelike, a plan to make immortality available to
anyone by creating a virtual copy of you as an avatar—a concept that
intrigued Jason, long before James Cameron parlayed it into a billion dollar
blockbuster.

JASON
LEIGH:
An
avatar is an instance of yourself that's digital, that will never die.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Jason knows he
can't really make you live forever, but he can use computers to preserve your
thoughts, memories and even the way you look, for eternity.

JASON
LEIGH:
Can
I live forever?

JASON
LEIGH'S AVATAR:
In the future your
children's children will be able to meet with you. Students will be able to
talk to scientists long gone, like Steven Hawking or Neil deGrasse Tyson, even.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Who, me? Well, I'd
be honored.

Jason's
vision of a world where we can build relationships with dead people, from the
famous to family members, was deepened by another movie.

JASON
LEIGH:
In
the film
Superman
, Jor-El, who is Superman's dad, is long-gone
and dead.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
And before long,
Jason was drawing his own inventions.

JASON
LEIGH:
I
remember we had these three-ring binders and paper would always rip, and it
just drove me nuts. And so I was imagining some futuristic computer. It wasn't
a computer then—I didn't know what a computer was—a futuristic
magical pad, where I would write on. Of course, nowadays we call that a tablet
computer.

STEVE
JOBS
(Apple/File Footage): And we call it
the iPad!

JASON
LEIGH:
If
only I'd patented it back then.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Then Jason saved up
to buy his own computer. And he instantly became obsessed, spending nine hours
a day at the keyboard.

JASON
LEIGH:
Even
when I went to sleep, I was writing code, while I was asleep. And I would find
an error, and I would wake up, and I would find, yep, certainly there was an
error in the code.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
When Jason left
Hong Kong to go to college, he had promised his parents he would study the
well-established field of chemical engineering, but he had a secret plan.

JASON
LEIGH:
The
first day I landed in the U.S., I head straight for the computer science
department and said, "How do I switch majors?" And then I wrote a letter back
to my dad and said, "I switched to computer science." He was actually
supportive.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
After college,
Jason was eager to make his mark designing computer graphics, and he learned
about E.V.L., the Electronic Visualization Lab, in Chicago.

JASON
LEIGH:
It
was people who had long hair, all sorts of strange and crazy people.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
These
self-proclaimed "techno-hippies" were finding new ways to merge computers and
art.

JASON
LEIGH:
And
I thought, "Wow, finally, a program that thinks and does things the way I've
always wanted to do." I said, "Well, I'm going to just let my hair grow out."
So I fit in and became one of the techno-hippies.

So
I think it's a great time to be a geek.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
At E.V.L., Jason
blends games and movies into every aspect of his life, from his work to his
play, to his car and even his kendo, which is as close as he's going to get to
a lightsaber battle in Chicago.

JASON
LEIGH:
It
very much is bringing Jedi knight-ism into reality.

No
respectable Jedi knight would use any other Jedi's sword.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
After 15 years,
Jason became lab director, and he could now take aim at his most ambitious
sci-fi fantasy: how to create a realistic avatar.

Still
an artist at his core, Jason used art as inspiration and his drawing skills to
develop ideas. In 2007, Jason joined the growing field of avatar researchers,
as he began work on his plan to live forever. As usual, Jason started with a
drawing.

JASON
LEIGH:
I
always start with a picture in my mind. The picture goes onto paper. The
picture goes into the computer. I spin the thing around to see if it makes
sense.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Next, Jason had to
make an avatar look like a living, breathing person. For a guinea pig, he used
himself.

JASON
LEIGH:
First
of all, we take photographs of their face from multiple angles, so that we can
use software to reconstruct the face in three dimensions, as realistically as
we can.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Then Jason teaches
his double to move just like he does.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
As Jason fine-tuned
the graphics, he needed to teach his avatar to think and talk. So he turned to
artificial intelligence experts.

JASON
LEIGH:
Our
collaboration involves researchers in Florida.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
To overcome the
thousand-mile gap between collaborators, Jason's team invented their own
20-foot video wall, so the researchers in Chicago and Florida could work on the
avatar's intelligence as if they were in the same room.

FLORIDA
RESEARCHER
(On Video Conference)
:
The avatar doesn't use its hands a lot to talk, and
I think at some point, they need to show...

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
And this idea of
preserving our life experiences for future generations has been catching on.

JASON
LEIGH:
When
I watched
Avatar
, the most interesting notion about it was when
these people passed on, their knowledge is absorbed into this tree of past
knowledge. And I thought, "Aha! That's what we're trying to do."

Ultimately,
what you have is a collective knowledge of people.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
Jason dreams of a future
where anyone can program all of their thoughts, feelings, memories, hopes and
fears into a virtual replica of themselves, so people can actually speak
directly to those long-gone.

JASON
LEIGH:
What
we'd like to do in the future is to try to break the avatar out of the box,
make it a person in the real world, conversational avatars that are as
intelligent as humans.

JASON
LEIGH'S AVATAR:
You mean me? You mean I'm
not really alive?

Why are they called avatars?

In Hinduism, an Avatara is a
divine being that takes the form of a human or beast.

Avatara literally means
crossing down to the realm of humans.

Avataras support the pious,
annihilate the impious and reestablish righteousness.

And unlike Jason Leigh's
"avatar"...

They are mortal.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
(As a driver)
Most things that break in a car can
be fixed, but every now and then, some things can go catastrophically wrong and
the results could be fatal.

(As an auto mechanic) In those situations, if we
could freeze time, we could fix the problem before the worst happens.

(As a driver) Well, some doctors think they can
do just that with people who are in the middle of life threatening crises like
a heart attack or stroke. Correspondent Peter Standring found out how
freezing, or at least slowing down time, is already saving lives. (As an auto
mechanic) All set. Drive safely. (As a driver) Thank you!

PETER
STRANDRING
(Correspondent)
:
Every once in a while there are news reports of
miraculous survivals that seem almost too incredible to be true: people who
drown in icy water or are buried in snow; their hearts stop beating and they're
getting no air; they seem to be dead, yet, mysteriously, they come back to
life. Somehow, their bodies seem to go into a state of suspended animation, so
they can survive without oxygen for an hour or more, instead of mere minutes.
But how?

Researchers
have been looking for clues in some surprising places, starting with this guy:
the thirteen-lined ground squirrel. He might not look like he has much in
common with near-death survivors, but, in fact, he's an expert at surviving an
experience that seems like it should kill him: hibernation.

Today,
I've come to Minnesota in search of these hibernating squirrels, and it's
freezing.

So the squirrels are actually underneath all of
this snow and under the ground, right here?

MATT
ANDREWS
(University of Minnesota)
:
All around here. The animals are probably about
four feet below the surface of the snow.

PETER
STRANDRING:
Man, how do they
survive that?

MATT
ANDREWS:
That's a great question, and it's
something we're trying to figure out in the laboratory.

PETER
STRANDRING:
Matt Andrews is trying
to unlock the secrets of hibernation. Could the hibernating squirrels have
something in common with people who mysteriously come back from the dead?

So what is this place? What is this room, Matt?

MATT
ANDREWS:
This is the environmental chamber
where we keep our animals in a state of hibernation.

PETER
STRANDRING:
Why are we whispering?

MATT
ANDREWS:
We want to duplicate the
conditions that the animal experiences underground during the winter, and so
we're duplicating that here, in the laboratory setting.

PETER
STRANDRING:
The squirrels' dark
laboratory home is kept at 40 degrees, about the same as it would be underground.

So,
underneath all this sawdust we have our thirteen-lined ground squirrel?

MATT
ANDREWS:
This is exactly what they would
look like when they were in their burrow. And there is a hibernating
thirteen-lined ground squirrel.

PETER
STRANDRING:
Comfy, cozy, rolled up
in a ball.

MATT
ANDREWS:
And this is the way this animal
spends the winter. It can survive in this state for months. Would you like to
hold one?

PETER
STRANDRING:
Absolutely. Wow. Look
at that: my own little bundle of fur. I think it's a first for me, holding a
hibernating animal.

When
these squirrels go into hibernation, it's an amazing process. Their heart rates
drop from 300 beats per minute to three or four. Their body temperature drops
from about 98 degrees to about 40. They only take a few breaths a minute and
use barely two percent of the amount of oxygen they need when they're awake.

Now,
you might think that all those drastic changes would be enough to kill off
these little guys, but despite it all, they emerge from their long winter
slumbers completely fine. There's no damage to any of their organs. There's no
damage to their brains. It's really incredible.

MATT
ANDREWS:
Okay, it's time to put him back
to bed now.

PETER
STRANDRING:
Okay, make sure you
tuck him in good.

Hibernation
is deeply mysterious.

MATT
ANDREWS:
So, Ann, what do you have going
on here?

PETER
STRANDRING:
In his lab, Matt
Andrews studies its impact on genes. He's discovered several genes that get
turned on in some cells only during hibernation. He hasn't completely solved
the mystery, but one thing is clear: somehow, those genes seem to reduce the
hibernating squirrels' need for oxygen.

Andrews'
ultimate goal is to figure out how we could do the same for people.

MATT
ANDREWS:
If you can understand the
molecules that are expressed when an animal hibernates, you can, possibly,
develop a therapy that can mimic the hibernation experience, so that a person
can survive a traumatic injury: a heart attack, a stroke, those sorts of
things.

PETER
STRANDRING:
Heart attack victims
usually die from a lack of oxygen, but if we could reduce the body's need for
oxygen, even temporarily, who knows how many lives could be saved. While the
squirrels do it with their genes, those drowning and avalanche victims who come
back from the dead somehow appear to survive without oxygen because of the
cold.

Now,
at a handful of hospitals around the country, emergency room doctors are
attempting to replicate those miraculous recoveries.

Todd
Van de Bussche is living proof it can work. Todd was just 39 years old when one
day he collapsed in the shower with a sudden cardiac arrest.

BETH
VAN DE BUSSCHE
(Todd Van de Bussche's
Wife)
:
All of a sudden, Todd
fell over and then he stopped breathing.

PETER
STRANDRING:
When the paramedics
arrived, Todd was technically dead. Luckily, he was brought to this E.R. in
Virginia, where doctors are trying out a new treatment.

E.R.
STAFF PERSON:
It sounds like E.M.S. got a
pulse back in about 20 minutes.

PETER
STRANDRING:
While one team worked frantically
on Todd's heart, another flooded his bloodstream with a solution of icy fluids
and drugs.

JON
ORNATO
(Virginia Commonwealth University)
:
By cooling as quickly as possible, we're trying to
lower the body's metabolism; we're trying to lower the rate at which the body
consumes and burns up oxygen.

E.R.
STAFF PERSON:
You're going to have to wait
till we get these tubes in. We're hurrying as fast as we can.

PETER
STRANDRING:
As the cold fluid
flooded his veins, Todd's body temperature dropped from 98 degrees to about 92.
His heart-rate slowed, and all the cells in his body used a fraction of their
normal oxygen.

Much
like the hibernating squirrels', Todd's body was carefully put into a state of
suspended animation.

JON
ORNATO:
We're
trying to stretch time, to give the body a chance to recover from the cardiac
arrest.

PETER
STRANDRING:
Twenty-four hours
later, Todd was slowly warmed up and brought back to life. Now, two years
later, he's in good health and enjoying life with a new baby.

JON
ORNATO:
We're
seeing that some of the patients that years ago we thought could never survive
are now waking up and going back to a fully functional existence.

PETER
STRANDRING:
This cooling therapy is
still relatively new, but, in the few places it's been tested, it's
substantially increased survival rates for some kinds of heart attacks. And
Todd has had one of the best recoveries so far.

TODD
VAN DE BUSSCHE:
I've gone through it, and
look how well my outcome has been. It's truly a miracle.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON:
And now for some
final thoughts on living forever. The urge to not want to die is as natural as
life itself. But you should always be careful what you wish for. One day, it
just might come true. If, starting now, everyone in the world lived forever,
then Earth's current population of seven billion, which would, at its current
rate of growth, double in 60 years, would instead double in only 35. Take this
forward six centuries or so, and you have so many people on Earth that
everybody will have to stand up straight, just to fit on all the world's land
area. So that leaves interplanetary colonization as the only obvious next step
to accommodate such vanities. But not all planets are Earth-like. Actually,
none of the known planets, inside or outside our solar system, are Earth-like.
Which means if bio-mechanical genetic engineering is what grants you
immortality, then why not alter or enhance our organs in ways that allow us to
thrive under the exotic conditions of alien planets? And that could only be decades
away. There's just one catch. You need a space program capable of leaving
Earth entirely, rather than just driving round the block in Earth orbit. Until
then, our bodies may out-advance our access to space, making Earth a very
crowded place to come. And that is the Cosmic Perspective.
And now, we'd like to hear your perspective on this episode of NOVA ScienceNOW.
Log on to our Web site and tell us what you think. You can watch any of these
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The
Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
.

This
material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under
Grant No. 0917517. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.